Join us to celebrate the opening of ‘Calder: François Premier’ at Hauser & Wirth in Paris.

This event will take place in the ground floor. Tickets are free, with no advance booking required.

In 1953, Calder returned to live in France for the first time in 20 years, settling in the countryside outside Aix-en-Provence and then in the small town of Saché in the Loire Valley. The artist’s productivity flourished in the expansive Provençal landscape and the modest, solitary spaces of a 17th-century stone house called François Premier in Saché. In Paris the following year, Galerie des Cahiers d’Art exhibited Calder’s ink and gouache paintings from Aix and Galerie Maeght presented ‘Aix. Saché. Roxbury. 1953–54’—a pair of shows that together marked Calder’s triumphant return to France.

Over 70 years later, inspired by a curious fortuity, ‘Calder: François Premier’ will be the first major project dedicated to this expansive postwar period in the life and career of one of the greatest artists of the 20th Century.

The exhibition will introduce new generations of viewers to two extraordinary, multi-dimensional works: ‘Les Granettes’ (1953), a large-scale standing mobile exhibited for the first time in 72 years, and ‘The Putney Mobile’ (1954), making its public European debut here seven decades after its creation. These sculptural masterpieces will be complemented by an important body of ink and gouache paintings and other works executed by Calder between these seminal years of 1953 and 1954.